


i felt your poltergeist presence

by badritual



Category: Halloween (2018), Halloween Movies - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Creepy Secret Admirer, F/M, Gen, Intense Fascination, Light Stalking, Non-Linear Narrative, Trick or Treat 2020, Trick or Treat Exchange, Trick or Treat: Trick, mutual fascination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:16:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27181670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badritual/pseuds/badritual
Summary: Laurie is certain she’s being watched.
Relationships: Michael Myers & Laurie Strode, Michael Myers/Laurie Strode
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	i felt your poltergeist presence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RobberBaroness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/gifts).



> Written for RobberBaroness for trickortreat.
> 
> I was really intrigued by your prompt of a perverse crush (set in the canon of the 2018 movie) and started wondering how that might have begun.

Laurie is certain she’s being watched. She _knows_ what it’s like to be watched, to feel a set of eyes burning into the back of her neck. To feel something a lot like anticipation curdling hot in the pit of her stomach.

She’s always felt like this, every day of her life. This slimy feeling of always being watched. Of being studied, almost, the way one might study a bug under a magnifying glass. Gossamer wings pinned to a cork board, struggling, wriggling to be free.

It doesn’t make any sense to her that someone would be that fascinated by her. Laurie is ordinary. A plain, ordinary girl from a plain, ordinary town. There’s nothing special about her. She’s not like her friends, Lynda and Annie. Where Lynda and Annie are wild and adventurous, risk-takers to the extreme, Laurie is risk-averse. 

Risk-repulsed, if that is a thing one could be. 

Somehow, it hasn’t made her feel any more safe.

* * *

When Laurie is a small child, seven or eight, she visits her grandmother for the very first time. 

Grandmother is kept at a special hospital, her father tells her. A special hospital for people who are very sick to their souls. 

Laurie has never been allowed to meet her grandmother. But this is a safe environment, Father says. Laurie wonders what an unsafe environment might be. What might happen if she and her grandmother were to meet without the constant supervision—eyes—of the hospital staff on them.

* * *

Grandmother is a vacant husk, an empty shell with blank black pits for eyes. She smiles, but there’s nothing behind it, eyes staring off into nowhere, mouth fixed in a smile that’s more a grimace than anything else. 

“What happened to her?” Laurie demands of her father. 

The three of them—Laurie, Father, and Mother—sit across from Grandmother. Grandmother stares through them, gnarled hands resting loosely in her lap. Other patients, other families mill about, but Laurie hardly notices them.

“When your grandmother was younger,” Father says, choosing his words carefully, picking through them the way a scavenger picks through garbage for hidden treasures. “She didn’t have an easy life.”

“Enough with the euphemisms, Jonathan,” Laurie’s mother sighs. 

“What’s a you-phemism,” Laurie asks, tugging on her mother’s sleeve.

“Your grandmother drank a lot of alcohol,” Mother says, tone sharp, shrugging Laurie’s hand away. “Her brain got very sick. Daddy and Uncle Jordan had to put her in this hospital.”

“Will she get better?” Laurie asks. “When I went to the hospital for my broken leg, I got better.”

Laurie’s father presses his lips together and a line creases between his eyebrows. “It’s not like that, Laurie. Grandmother can’t get better. She’ll always be sick.”

Laurie turns and stares at the slumped, empty-eyed figure that is her grandmother. The straw-like hair, the blank glassy eyes, the fixed grimace. The knotty hands clasped in her wide lap. 

Grandmother looks like a scarecrow, the kind of thing you’d stick in the garden to frighten away the squirrels and the birds and the other nuisances. 

“Grandmother,” Laurie says, but she doesn’t respond. 

Laurie feels a hand clasping gently on her shoulder. 

“It’s time to go, Laurie,” Mother says, her tone gentle now. Sad, maybe. 

Mother and Father get up and gather their things, and Laurie watches Father go up to Grandmother and try to embrace her. He puts his arms around her stiff shoulders and pulls her close to him, and Laurie thinks—just for a moment!—that Grandmother sinks into his touch, eyelids fluttering. But then her eyes snap back open and they’re just as blank as before, like glassy blue marbles. 

Laurie casts about, uncomfortable in her skin, itching and unnerved, suddenly eager to be in the safety of their car. She realizes it’s because she feels eyes on her, prickling the hairs on the back of her neck.

She looks around and around, head spinning, and then she sees him there. In a dark corner of the room. He’s a boy, a kid like Laurie is, maybe a little older. His hair is wild, a tangled mass of brown nettles, and his eyes are as blank and dead as Grandmother’s. 

But he’s watching her. She can feel it, sense it. When she moves into Mother’s side, as they wait for Father to finish saying goodbye, Laurie feels the boy’s dead shark eyes follow her. 

“Mother, who is that boy?” Laurie pulls on her mother’s arm and points to where she saw the boy. 

Mother lifts her head from her little compact mirror, lips slashed a bright shade of red. “I don’t see—oh,” Mother says, faltering for just a moment. “That’s Michael.”

“Michael?” Laurie prods her to continue. To give her a little more.

“Michael Myers,” her mother says. Her tone drops to almost a whisper. “It’s not nice to point, Laurie.”

Laurie looks up at her mother and glimpses an unfamiliar look in her eye, shimmering almost like tears but not quite. Her mother is afraid. Of Michael? Of that boy?

“What happened to him?” Laurie asks.

“He is a very sick little boy,” Mother says, snapping her compact shut and shoving it in her purse. “And we’re leaving now. Jonathan?”

Laurie looks over. Father is staring at Grandmother, shoulders hunched up near his eyes, a limp defeated look in his eye. 

“All right, Marilyn,” Father says. He reaches out and takes Mother’s hand in his. “Come along, Laurie.”

Laurie follows after her parents, but just as they reach the doors—where a big red exit sign floats over their heads—she turns and looks for the boy. For Michael. 

He hasn’t moved from the corner, she doesn’t think he’s moved an inch. 

Michael is still staring at her—with his dead, empty eyes—and she wonders what he sees in her that’s so interesting.

The feeling buzzes in her stomach like bees the whole long drive home.

* * *

Laurie is being watched. She knows it. Feels it on her skin. Even in the dark, she can feel his eyes on her. 

She flings a hand out, groping along the wall until her fingers hit the light switch. She flips it and bright, buttery light fills the kitchen.

Karen and Allyson are asleep upstairs. Laurie had only come downstairs because she’d thought she heard a creaking on the stairs. The place is old, but new to them. Laurie isn’t yet familiar with all of the house’s noises. 

The fingers of her other hand are coiled tight around the handle of a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. 

Her heart judders in her throat. 

The shadows stretch tall, almost as tall as Him, splay across the walls. 

“Michael,” Laurie calls out. 

The night breathes in, exhales all around her. It’s dead silent now but for Laurie’s breathing, even the crickets have gone quiet. 

Laurie’s fingers tighten around the bat. Splinters catch in her skin and she barely feels them. 

There’s another creak then. The unmistakable sound of a footfall, careful, light. Coming from the hallway leading to the kitchen. 

He’s coming to her. 

Laurie wraps both hands securely around the handle of the baseball bat.

* * *

When Laurie is fourteen she receives only one Valentine’s card in her locker. Annie and Lynda get hundreds of them, covered in glitter and ribbons and glue, from nearly every boy in school. 

She’s not jealous, though. She finds she doesn’t like the idea of all that attention. All that admiration. She likes her one heart-shaped Valentine’s card, her name written on the front in drippy red paint like blood. 

_Laurie,_ it says on the front. When she opens the card she’s disappointed to see that it’s blank. 

But not quite. The sender has drawn a little stick figure family inside, with red ink as to be almost imperceptible. But Laurie’s sharp eyes find the hidden lines and squiggles of the drawings. It feels like a secret, like something meant only for Laurie and for—

 _Him_. 

It’s a drawing of a mother—but no father because he’s died—and a girl in a school uniform like Laurie’s. And standing off to the side, nearly off the page entirely, is a boy. Blank face, black dots for eyes, wild squiggles for hair. 

Laurie turns the card over but there’s no name on the back. And no other writing but for her name. 

Laurie’s heart thunders in her ears and she looks around, but it’s her lunch period and the hallways are empty. 

She looks back down at the card, which she holds in now-trembling fingers. 

Her hairline tingles and the back of her neck itches, her armpits perspire and her skin feels so tight and ill-fitting. She knows then that she’s being watched. 

Laurie looks up, into a curtain of blond hair. Eyes searching the shadows for Him.

 _Michael_. The name comes to her, nearly dances off her lips, but she clamps them shut, as if saying his name will conjure him in front of her.

* * *

“Michael,” Laurie says again.

The shadows shift, move around her. Like she’s cast a conjuring spell just by saying his name. 

She feels his presence even if she can’t see him in the deep black pools of shadows. 

In her old home, she knew where all the shadows and crevices were. She knew where the lights might hit just right, and she’d be able to see the faint outline of him there. 

But she isn’t familiar with this place. 

“Michael,” Laurie says, a little louder this time, “I know you’re there.”

She can feel him even more acutely now. Hears his heart beating in her own ears as loudly as her own. Feels his breath on the back of her neck, somehow, through that mask he put on that horrible night and hasn’t taken off since. 

She can feel him answering her in the silence. In the way the hairs on your arms stand up and your skin tingles right before lightning strikes. 

Laurie waits for him to come to her.


End file.
